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“... the Conqueror, and the words ‘noble’, ‘gentle’ and ‘aristocrat’ themselves come from French. Within two decades, the Conquest had been commemorated by two astonishing historical artefacts. The Bayeux Tapestry (pre-1082) must be the only artistic masterpiece that is also a crucial source for a major historical event. Domesday Book (1086) provides ...”

“... chance of survival lay in the impossibility of reading everything he’d written. But no other French poet has had such influence: unlike Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Hugo affected more or less every poet who came after him. He threw out so many novelties he could hardly keep up with himself. A reader of any of the new selections will not only discover a way ...”

“... saw the English language firmly established, so firmly indeed that the centuries of dominance by a French-speaking élite after 1066 proved, in the end, to be insufficient to root it out. It also saw the establishment of Christianity in England. This made little difference to men’s moral values: but in other ways it involved a radical cultural ...”

“... declared Bourne, disillusioned that the masses did not rise up in resistance. In the Twenties, the French writer Julien Benda continued this critique of patriotism in The Betrayal of the Intellectuals. The ‘Treason of the Clerks’, as the French title had it, resulted when eminent cultural figures renounced ...”

“... That Patrick O’Brian would write a good book about the early life of Joseph Banks was to be expected. Banks combined the enthusiasm and practical competence of one of O’Brian’s fictional heroes, Jack Aubrey, with the passion for natural history of another, Stephen Maturin. Moreover O’Brian’s accounts in his novels of 18th-century seamanship are, like Tolstoy’s battle pieces, better historical description than most historians manage: it was clear that the variety of incident in Banks’s voyage to the Great South Sea with Cook, which matches that of any fictional adventure, was a subject made for him ...”

“... an hour, but I didn’t learn to swim until I was 33, so I am not very fast. I have got lots of French books because I am an artist who loves Surrealism, which flourished in France. Mostly I look at the pictures, though I have read quite a few in translation. Imagine my shock when I read in the 20 March issue of the London Review, in Edmund Leach’s review ...”

“... Empire lost its hold over Lebanon in the 19th century, the British backed the Druze and the French the Maronites. ‘If one man hits another,’ a local chieftain complained, ‘the incident becomes an Anglo-French affair: there might even be trouble between the two countries if a cup of coffee gets spilled on the ...”

“... manuscript of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and the meeting between Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse in the Patrick Hamilton novel of that title. But he had a devoted reader there, and I believe that the most revealing piece Jeremy wrote that term was directed at Jack Wolfenden, who in 1954 had been appointed by the Home Secretary (the egregious, homophobic David ...”

“... suggests in his The Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe, quoting the learned 19th-century French scholar Alfred Maury, author of such abstruse books as Fées dans le Moyen Age and Histoire de la Magie. There is, however, one serious caveat attaching to every archaism. However slight such perdurables may be, however sweetened by the passage of time, it ...”

“... noisy and predictable: excerpts, interviews and even reviews focusing on homosexual love-lives, Patrick White’s awful temper, and the detective-biographer’s own gripping adventures getting hold of 2500 letters. A magazine cover shows the author, companion and dog arranged in a pastoral trio in the Fifties. Towards an Australian Bloomsbury? There has to ...”

“... original intuitions: ‘In the centre, an occidental urban logic, all lined up, ordered, like the French language. On the other side, Creole’s open profusion according to Texaco’s logic. Mingling these two tongues, dreaming all tongues, the Creole city speaks a new language and no longer fears Babel.’ This analogy between language and the city runs ...”

“... ever. Three centuries later, Thomas Carlyle will write that but for you there would have been no French Revolution, no America. This is what happened not in a dream but metaphorically to Martin Luther, a hitherto obscure monk and professor of theology in an undistinguished university recently founded in Wittenberg, a small town built on a sandbank in middle ...”

“... content with being a heroine of women’s emancipation and a press pioneer, Caroline is also half-French, a grande dame in the making, and a youthful protégée of Henry Adams and Henry James. She is shown having tea at Lamb House and receiving Henry Adams’s blessing on the youth of the new century; and Empire, by and large, sustains our curiosity about the ...”

“... known and often revealing sources, such as J. Kaulek’s edition of the correspondence of the French ambassadors at the English court. This is to the author’s credit. But these sources are used uncritically, and contemporary participants and observers are quoted as if their views all have equal validity and can be taken as simple ‘evidence’. The ...”

“... Patrick Hamilton is remembered today, if at all, for the short pre-war novel Hangover Square, and the stage thrillers Rope and Gaslight. They are good of their kind, but they lack the feel of involuntary masterpieces which still attends their up till now vanished predecessor – the trilogy of novels brought together in 1935 as Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky ...”